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Recommendations to the Board

Board Advice Home | ALAC Advice Status | GAC Advice Status | RSSAC Advice Status | RZERC Advice Status | SSAC Advice Status


The Board receives recommendations from a variety of sources from the ICANN community, including advice from the Advisory Committees as set forth in Article 12 of ICANN's Bylaws. As part of the Process Documentation Initiative in 2017, a workflow document and handbook were created to provide more transparency into the Board Advice Process. For more information on Registration Data, please visit our Registration Data at ICANN page.

The Advice from each of the Advisory Committees is available at the links below.

Action Request Register Phases and Descriptions

Advice to the Board is processed via a five-phase process, as described below. Click on the individual advice status pages for each Advisory Committee for more detailed information regarding the phases.

Action Request Register Phases and Descriptions

Background on the Action Request Register (ARR) and Board Advice Reporting

The ICANN Organization developed the Action Request Register (ARR) process framework, described in more detail in the pages above, to manage community requests to the ICANN Board and Organization in a consistent, efficient, and transparent manner. Centralized processes were implemented to accommodate advice to the Board from ICANN's Advisory Committees including: the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC), Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC), the Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC), and the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC).

In October 2016, ICANN issued a status report to the ALAC, RSSAC and SSAC on historical advice to the ICANN Board issued between 2010 and mid-2015. The Board's status reports on historical items can be found below. Updated Status on all items can be found in the reports listed above.

  • At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) (19 October 2016) [PDF]
  • Root Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC) (19 October 2016) [PDF]
  • Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) (19 October 2016) [PDF]

In March 2023, ICANN issued a status report to the GAC on historical advice from 2013 to 2023. The status report can be found below.

  • Governmental Advisory Committee (15 March 2022) [PDF]

Important note: The Board Resolutions are as reported in the Board Meeting Transcripts, Minutes & Resolutions portion of ICANN's website. Only the words contained in the Resolutions themselves represent the official acts of the Board. The text provided in this database explaining Resolutions is an interpretation that has no official authority and does not represent the purpose behind the Board actions, nor does any explanation or interpretation modify or override the Resolutions themselves. Resolutions can only be modified through further action by the ICANN Board.

Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."